


Say You Were Made To Be Mine - Part One

by deandratb



Series: The One I Was Meant To Find [1]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-03-06 11:03:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13409901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deandratb/pseuds/deandratb
Summary: In a world where everyone feels their soulmate's pain, Donna is fated to be linked to her boss--who refuses to believe in soulmates at all.Donna sat on the floor, surrounded by Josh’s briefing memos, a hand flat against her heart. The thud of it beating, sluggish from shock, was all she had to ground her. Josh wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be dead. She would feel that too...wouldn’t she?





	Say You Were Made To Be Mine - Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Part one of two, because this story was getting awfully long for a one-shot.

It was an imperfect thing, finding a soulmate--even in a world that promised everyone a match.

Josh never really believed in them. Joanie used to talk about the bond between two souls constantly, and as a child he had been skeptical. _Feeling your soulmate’s pain? What kind of crazy world were they living in?_

She was eagerly awaiting the first twinge. A stubbed toe, a paper cut, appendicitis. “Whatever it is, I’ll know the moment it happens,” his big sister told him. “I’ll know there’s someone out there. Just waiting for me.”

Joanie never felt it, whatever that _thing_ was supposed to be. After she died, Josh wasn’t sure if that was because he was right, and the whole thing was ridiculous...or if she had no match because she was going to die young.

Neither option made him happy, so he chose to think he was right. After all, he liked being right. Especially if it meant not having to worry about living someone else’s worst experiences. 

And while other kids were starting to feel the pangs, swapping stories about what they thought was happening to their soulmate right this moment, somewhere out there in the world...he felt nothing at all. 

He became more sure, with every year that passed, that the people around him were experiencing some sort of mass delusion. It must give their lives meaning, elevating every phantom pain to the level of fate. Like religion: Josh understood it on an intellectual level, but he didn’t have the same connection to it that other people seemed to have. It didn’t bring him the same joy.

As his high school graduation approached, he was smug about his certainty that in a world full of believers, he knew the truth. There was no soulmate out there for him. Joanie had just been a romantic teenage girl, wishing for something she never found.

He was going to work for what he wanted, not expect the universe to hand it to him. He threw himself into school and planned his future in politics with a single-minded focus that made his father proud and worried his mother. 

And then, when he was seventeen, he was sitting at the dinner table with a mouth full of brisket, and it happened. He slammed his arm against the table in shock, making the plates rattle. 

“Joshua!” 

“My mouth!” He mumbled around his dinner, fingers flying to his lips. It felt like...it felt like taking a nosedive across third base and slamming into the kid holding the ball before he was safe. 

It felt exactly like he had just fallen teeth-first against something. While he was sitting perfectly still, eating dinner.

Josh’s wide, terrified eyes met his mother’s across the table, and she sighed. “Oh, Joshua.” 

Part happy, part melancholy. Her little boy was growing up so fast on her these days. But Noah smiled, squeezing her hand under the table, and she smiled back with tears in her eyes. Their son deserved a soulmate who made him just as happy as his father made her.

“It hurts,” Josh protested, petulant betrayal in his tone.

“Yes.” Noah clapped a hand on his shoulder, pleased. “It’s supposed to, son. It’s okay.”

It wasn’t okay. 

He hated it. 

His mouth hurt. It hurt for three days, worse than when he had to have a tooth pulled as a kid--and it made no sense! That was the part that annoyed him the most. How could he be feeling this much pain, from out of nowhere?

At a certain point, all the crazy ridiculous theories became the most sensible explanation...but how could he accept it? He didn’t **want** it to be true.

Josh didn’t want a soulmate. Not when he had such careful plans for his life. Not when his sister never lived long enough to find hers.

So he pushed it out of his mind, and did his best to ignore it. Until he convinced himself it never happened at all. 

****

Donna wasn’t one of those girls who spent all her time dreaming about her soulmate. 

She knew he was out there, somewhere. Her parents were so tightly bonded she never expected anything else--and she felt her first phantom pains when she was only five. For her, it wasn’t the stuff of romantic daydreams...it was like oxygen, something she didn’t have to think about because it was always with her. A fact of life.

He twisted his ankle when she was ten, leaving her limping for days. When he broke a finger she was fifteen, and it made homework difficult for the next month. 

Her body became more than just her own, a map of another person’s injuries. Donna learned to work around the bruises and scrapes that continued well into adulthood; her soulmate was clearly accident-prone.

After she fell out of a tree when she was eight, breaking her arm, her first thought was a white, blinding pain like she had never experienced on her own before.

Her second thought was that somewhere out there, somebody’s arm was screaming at them, just like hers. 

So no, she never dreamed about her soulmate, imagining romantic weddings or honeymoons like the other girls. But she took comfort in his existence, in the bond that stretched between them. Every neck ache or stiff back--her soulmate worked too hard for someone their age--was a reminder that he was waiting for her.

Whatever her future held, she could count on that.

She had no reason to expect that her soulmate would be the one person in the world who refused to believe in them. It figured; Donna was fated to spend her life with the stubbornest man in the world. 

****

She was tuned to him, after so many years of injuries big and small. It made it easy for her to figure it out. And it was almost funny, that it was **Josh** she’d been feeling for all these years.

Donna never would have guessed, when it was his office she snuck into, that he was her soulmate. No matter how cute she thought he was, or how often she caught him watching her with that dumbstruck expression on his face.

On her third day with his badge around her neck, though, Donna heard Josh mutter a curse under his breath, after he caught his hand on a filing cabinet drawer. 

She knew that was what had happened, even though she was in another room. She knew before he came to whine at her for sympathy--because she felt it. And when Josh was reading on his way to a meeting and walked into a door, Donna had the headache for the rest of the day.

By the end of her first week, before she was even getting paid, Donna had figured it out.

Her careful attempt to broach the subject couldn’t have gone worse.

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those people,” Josh said, rolling his eyes.

“What do you mean? I just asked what you know about your soulmate so far.”

“Oh, no. Don’t get him started,” Sam warned her from the floor, where he was scribbling speech notes.

“It’s a simple question.”

“You would think so, and yet...”

“What I know about my soulmate is that I don’t have one,” Josh informed her firmly. “Because there is no such thing.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not.”

She looked helplessly at Sam. “He--”

“I know.” Sam offered her a sympathetic smile. “He was the first nonbeliever I ever met, too.”

“I don’t understand.” She looked between the two of them, sure they were teasing her. Maybe they pranked all the new volunteers this way. “How can you not believe in soulmates? Weren’t your parents bonded?”

Josh frowned, continuing to flip through the piles of paper she’d left on his desk. “Yeah, my parents were delusional like a lot of people. So what?”

“So, didn’t they explain it you?”

“They think a lot of things that have perfectly rational explanations,” he said with a shrug. “My dad believes in Bigfoot. Doesn’t mean I have to.”

“I-” Donna cut herself off before she stammered her way into a declaration that Josh clearly wasn’t ready for. “I can’t believe you think soulmates don’t exist,” she said instead. “Haven’t you felt yours?”

“Can we talk about something important?” Josh replied. “Like the polling numbers we got this morning? I have to be able to explain them to the candidate in an hour.”

Donna couldn’t imagine anything more important than their unavoidably entwined futures, but she gave up. For a while.

After all, she had found her soulmate, hadn’t she? Whether he accepted it, or not, fate had brought them together. There was time for everything else.

****

When Donna left to go back to her boyfriend, Josh was miserable. 

He’d gotten so used to having her around, he wasn’t prepared to work without her. And everybody knew it.

Toby’s pointed comments were like salt in a wound Josh wasn’t willing to admit he had; CJ’s sympathy was worse. Thank god for Sam, who knew him better than anyone and pretended nothing was wrong. 

Sam just nodded along when Josh complained about his workload, ignoring the elephant in the room with the practiced skill of a Democrat who’d been raised in a conservative California suburb. He didn’t mention the way Josh avoided saying her name, as though he could erase the hole she left behind.

The ache of missing her was so sharp, Josh felt it every day while she was back in Wisconsin. It made it impossible to actually forget her and move on.

It made it easy to blame the pain in his ankle on twisting something in his sleep. Even when Donna came back with a bandage wrapped around the same spot that had been bothering him.

Coincidence, he thought. And it served her right, not bothering to salt her sidewalk.

If he had any lingering doubts, a voice that sounded like his sister in his head, Josh refused to listen. He brushed that off along with his annoyance at Donna quitting in the first place, slipping back into their professional dynamic as though she’d never left.

“There’s a pile of stuff on the desk,” he told her, ignoring her apology.

Josh picked up lunch, though, so she could stay at her desk. Donna took comfort in that--and in his slight limp when he handed it to her.

She had missed him, too.

****

After the election, when she officially became Josh’s direct subordinate, Donna resigned herself to reality: her feelings had no place in this job. They couldn’t have any kind of romance while she was his assistant. The last thing this administration needed was a scandal.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to nudge him along on the question of soulmates in general. Someday, they wouldn’t be in the White House, and when that day came, she needed to be able to get through that thick head of his.

They were fated for each other, which meant there **would** be a chance for them. Eventually. 

She was still trying to figure out how to have a second conversation about soulmates with Josh when the staff headed to Rosslyn. Everyone was feeling amped up, reenergized to go on offense with President Barlet leading the way.

Donna stayed behind, answering Josh’s phone and joking with Margaret about how insufferable he was going to be after the President’s speech. He was never happier than when he had somebody to fight.

She was the canary in the coal mine that night, the reason Margaret and Mrs. Landingham and all the other assistants found out something was wrong even before it came on the news.

Donna collapsed in the middle of the office, papers flying out of her hands while she clutched at her chest and desperately tried to draw in air.

“Oh my god! Donna, what’s wrong?” Normally, it might have been Ginger at her side, but most of the assistants had gone home after the motorcade left. It had been nice getting to swap stories with Margaret in the quiet. But now it was Leo’s hyper-perceptive assistant checking her pulse and encouraging her to breathe.

“Donna, can you hear me? Can you talk?”

She nodded, struggling to find words. All these years, pangs big and small, and she had never felt anything like this. She didn’t know anything could hurt this way, like her soul was trying to leave her body.

 _Like she was dying._

The realization was a knot in her chest, deeper than the ache she was feeling on Josh’s behalf. Somehow, she knew--he wasn’t just hurt. He was dying. 

_What the hell had happened?_

“It’s Josh,” she whispered, trying to stop Margaret’s firm check of her vitals. “I’m not hurt. It’s Josh. I think...I think he’s been shot.”

She’d never seen a shooting before, let alone been pierced with a bullet. But the tearing sensation, the way her ribs felt not just bruised but shattered, she wasn’t sure what else it could be. 

“The President,” Margaret gasped, jumping up to turn the TV volume on. She didn’t comment on Donna’s assumption, let alone what it implied. 

Maybe Margaret had already figured it out. Or maybe she just wasn’t surprised. She was a good friend.

Donna sat on the floor, surrounded by Josh’s briefing memos, a hand flat against her heart. The thud of it beating, sluggish from shock, was all she had to ground her. 

Josh wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be dead. 

_She would feel that too...wouldn’t she?_

“Mrs. Landingham!” Dimly, she heard Margaret on Toby’s line, the closest phone she could grab. “Something happened at Rosslyn. Something’s happened to Josh.”

Donna looked up at the tinny music that preceded a news bulletin, and heard Margaret inhale sharply. “No, I don’t know. I’m not sure. Find a television.”

Hanging up, Margaret returned to Donna’s side, reaching for her hand when the news anchor informed the world that President Bartlet had been shot. They heard the soft footfalls of Mrs. Landingham as she ran past them before the bulletin was over.

“I...I have to go,” Donna said to herself, looking up at Margaret when she squeezed her hand. “They’ll take him to a hospital close by. GW, maybe?”

“You can’t do anything for the President right now,” Margaret said gently. “None of us can.”

“No, not the President. Josh. I’ve got to go.”

Margaret shook her head. “You shouldn’t drive. I’ll handle the phones...” She glanced around them, brow furrowed. “Oh! Larry!”

He froze on his way to CJ’s office. “Yes?” 

“Can you drive Donna to GW?”

The sound of the television repeating news about the shooting got his attention, and his eyes widened. “Uh, yeah. Of course. Let me just--” 

He looked down at the folder in his hand, then at Donna, who was pale and trembling as she stood, clutching Margaret’s arm. “Let’s go.”

****

She had a hell of a time getting in to where CJ and the others were waiting. It made sense; no other assistants were trying to join senior staff at the hospital--they weren’t expecting her.

But she needed answers. She needed to be there. 

And luckily for her, the President’s staff were also Josh’s family. So when she rushed through the waiting room doors, then halted abruptly with all their eyes on her, their response was immediate. 

CJ led her to a chair, filling her in on the President’s condition. 

“And Josh?”

It was Toby, his eyes full of inexplicable guilt, who got out of his chair to sit next to her. Somehow, the Communication Director saw it first--in the way Donna’s hand kept fluttering up to her heart, or the winces she tried hard to cover.

He might have just recognized the look on her face, horror mixed with agony, and connected the dots.

“He was shot in the chest,” Toby said quietly, his warm hand patting hers. “They’re still operating. They don’t know...well, it’s bad. But I think you already knew that.”

Donna blinked back tears, and decided there was no point in hiding it. Not now, not when Josh might...

She couldn’t finish that thought. It hurt to breathe.

The ache she felt from Josh was dull now, though, probably from the heavy anesthetic they were pumping into him while they operated. 

As long as the pain was still there, Donna promised herself, so was their connection. Which meant Josh was alive.

At this point, she would take the miracle.

“Yeah,” she answered Toby softly, nodding. “Yeah, I could feel it.”

“Lucky you,” he said with a quirk of his lips. “Fate had to go and pick that one.”

Donna sniffled. “He can be a jerk, but he’s great.”

“I know.” Toby laid his hand on her back for a moment before standing back up. “And when he wakes up, you get to tell him just how wrong he’s been his whole life. He’ll love that.”

Using “when” instead of “if” was Toby’s gift to her. Donna offered him a grateful smile as he headed back to his chair.

Everybody knew that CJ and Toby were soulmates, and that they weren’t together anymore. Nobody knew why. 

But the way they looked at each other, the way Toby followed CJ with his eyes whenever she walked by, it was impossible to ignore. It was a small comfort for Donna, knowing she wasn’t the only one in the weeds with it. 

Still, she stood outside the surgery window until her legs threatened to give out. Feeling the full-body throb of Josh’s injury, watching the shallow rise and fall of his breathing. Nothing could soothe the fear that formed a sour weight in her stomach.

_What was the point of soulmates if all they did was cause you pain?_

****

Donna prayed, and Josh lived.

Abbey found her in the waiting room, while Jed was still in surgery, and told her the story of how her husband almost became a priest. 

"He’d given up,” the First Lady explained, gripping Donna’s hand in hers. “His father did his best to destroy Jed’s belief in soulmates, in his own future. So it didn’t matter that he had always been able to feel me. He couldn’t trust his own feelings.”

The President had nearly died, just like Josh. Donna had admired Abbey since she joined the campaign, but she’d never felt close to her before. In the antiseptic room, with its fluorescent lights and uncomfortable chairs, she listened to Dr. Bartlet offer her hope through teeth clenched against Jed’s pain.

Donna realized that day that soulmates didn’t have to come easy to get a happy ending.

****

Bedridden, impatient Josh was a pain in the ass, but Donna found excuses to stay by his side as much as she could.

She listened to his drug-addled stories and rolled her eyes at his whining...and every time he cried out in his sleep during his recovery, she shuddered along with him and tried not to show it.

He wasn’t ready.

She wasn’t, either.

Donna had always found it so comforting, being tied to her soulmate. Never, not once, had she realized it was terrifying.

She wasn’t proud of it, but she was scared of losing him, to a bullet or to his own willful disbelief. This was Josh, after all. If she forced the issue, there was a very real possibility that he might just run in the opposite direction.

She refused to risk pushing him away.

So she oversaw his bed rest and ran his office, and ignored the way everybody was looking at her now that they knew. They expected her relationship with Josh to change. They expected **him** to change.

But as much as the shooting had sharpened her feelings, making them impossible to avoid, it had also made clear to her what mattered.

Donna just wanted to keep him. 

That was how, months after Rosslyn, her feelings for Josh remained the biggest open secret in the West Wing. 

Though everybody who was in the office or the hospital that night knew that she and Josh were linked, they had also been subjected to his loud rants against soulmate bonds. A lot. And thankfully, discretion was a prerequisite for working at the White House. 

Everybody knew. But nobody talked about it. 

When Josh put his hand through a window that winter and Donna brought her concerns to Leo, she could see the worry in his eyes. 

The Chief of Staff never asked questions that he didn’t want the answers to, so he simply thanked her for looking out for Josh, and took care of it.

When Josh sent her flowers on the wrong anniversary--a tradition he knew she hated--and Sam explained things to Ainsley, he left out the part about soulmates.

Donna wasn’t sure which one of them Sam was protecting, but she was grateful. The truth of what really happened to bring her back to the campaign was the only secret she was willing to discuss with Josh that night. 

Comparing him to her ex in passing was such a minor slip, Josh didn’t even catch it. 

It was amazing what he could miss when he was determined not to see it.

****

Working from the basement for a year, Ainsley never did learn the truth, which was how Donna found herself set up with a Republican. 

She had been on a few dates since she joined the campaign and figured out that Josh was her destiny. What was she supposed to do while she waited for him to catch up, spend every night with her roommate’s cats?

Sure, there was no future for her with any of the guys--there wasn’t even much fun in it. But it beat reruns and Chinese food and wondering what Josh was up to.

And Cliff surprised her. He actually was fun, and smart, and a bit of a challenge. 

Donna knew that her fate was Josh, she knew that Cliff was a terrible idea on multiple levels, but when it came down to it she was lonely and sick of feeling like a part of her was missing. 

So she made the mistake with her eyes open, and lived to regret it.

The look on Josh’s face when he found out was almost as bad as the bright flash of pain that hit her later. She was pretty sure Josh punched a wall after insisting everything was fine, and she hated that she couldn’t confront him about it without explaining how she knew.

She hated pretending, evading, all the energy she spent on misdirection. 

It was exhausting, being Josh Lyman’s soulmate.

“Haven’t you ever felt it?” Donna asked him in a moment of frustration, while they waited for Cliff to bring back her diary and everything they weren’t saying weighed on her.

“What?”

“Pain you couldn’t explain? A sign that somebody was out there, tied to you?”

He shook his head. “Not this again.”

“Seriously, Josh. You’ve never felt anything?”

“Of course I’ve had weird moments occasionally,” he replied with a shrug. “I just don’t think a muscle cramp equals destiny.”

Donna almost told him then, sitting on a bench waiting for Josh’s plan to save her. She almost threw years of caution away just to wipe the smirk off his face and **make** him believe her.

But Cliff crossed the street toward them, holding evidence of the dumbest thing she’d ever done, and she saw the way Josh bit down on what he truly wanted to say.

The king of impulsive decisions held his tongue for her sake, so she let it go.

****

When Josh came back from his first meeting with Amy Gardner, stars in his eyes, Donna realized she should have said something while she had the chance.

She stood by and watched him fall in love with somebody else, watched as Amy stomped on his feelings for the sake of her crusade.

He slipped farther from her every day. Her stomach twisted each time Amy called and Josh got that goofy grin on his face, and there was nothing she could do but wait.

If you didn’t believe in soulmates, Donna learned, you were free to love blindly. She wondered if he and Amy had that in common, or if somewhere out there the activist had a soulmate whose heart she had already broken.

Really, there was no excuse for the way Donna chose to wall her feelings up and move on. She knew Josh and Amy had to have an expiration date. But it hurt; it hurt too much, and she couldn’t take it.

After Amy, there was the aftermath, Josh moping with those sad puppy eyes as the reelection campaign approached. And Donna barely had time to breathe before Amy was back, Josh mentioning her at odd moments and pretending he wasn’t interested.

She knew what was coming. She didn’t know how many years Josh could spend in the same vicious cycle, wash-rinse-repeat, but she knew he still wasn’t ready.

If he could find happiness elsewhere, Donna decided, there was no reason for her to be alone and miserable. Jack Reese was a good guy, handsome and honorable and willing, and if she and Josh were really soulmates, then there was no harm in it.

Yes, it was petty of her to get Josh involved, hoping just a little that he might say no and face reality. 

He didn’t, though. He snarked and complained and threw in a few eyerolls for good measure, but he helped. 

So Donna went out with Jack, a perfectly nice guy she knew she didn’t belong with, and let herself be happy.

She had no idea that seeing her happy with somebody else would push Josh over the edge.

****

For some reason, her holiday plans with Jack turned Josh into a crazy person, muttering about reservations and getting a panicked look in his eyes whenever he was reminded that she would be gone over Christmas.

“It’s not like we usually spend the holidays together,” she complained to Carol when he was out of earshot. “He’s acting like he’ll be lost without me.”

“You know why he’s freaking,” Carol replied with a grin.

“I really don’t. I mean, I know Christmas is hard for him with his dad gone, but he seemed okay this year.”

“Donna, come on. It’s not about that. It’s about you. And Jack.” Carol glanced behind them, then lowered her voice. “He loves you. He’s been a wreck since Jack asked you out.”

“Yeah, right.” Donna shook her head. “He doesn’t care who I go out with. He’s still hung up on Amy.”

“I’m not saying he isn’t. I’m just saying, he doesn’t like you with Jack. Even if he hasn’t figured out why yet.”

It was Carol’s words she thought of when Josh asked for her help, then got defensive. 

“Why would I think you were trying to keep me here?” She pressed him, more direct than she usually was with Josh. If he had feelings for her, she wanted to hear it from him. 

She could no longer remember a time when she didn’t love him; the least he could do was say the words. It didn’t even matter that he didn’t believe in soulmates--well, it did, of course it did, but it mattered more that maybe he loved her in spite of that.

That would be its own kind of miracle.

He brushed it off, tried to step around it. Joked about how they would spend Christmas together, snowmen in the Briefing Room, and she wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. It had been five years now, and she was sick of tiptoeing around their connection.

“You know I believe in soulmates, right?” She asked after Leo called and asked her to come to his office.

“Yeah,” Josh replied. “But you’re generally sane, besides that.”

“Oh, be quiet,” she snapped, annoyed with his weirdness and refusal to give her a direct answer and the fact that she was about to spend Christmas with a great guy she didn’t love even a little because her whole heart belonged to someone who didn’t want it.

“The point is, you know I believe in them, whatever you think of it.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Jack isn’t mine.” She grabbed her coat, letting her words ring in his ears as she left to see what Leo needed.

****

“Donna **left**?”

He’d been preparing the perfect comeback to what she said, waiting for her return, and the whole time, she was meeting a helicopter...and leaving, just like that?

Josh was adrift after that, making calls that got him nowhere while he pictured Donna cozied up to her Republican boyfriend--what was it with her and Republicans anyway--until Leo found him again. 

“Was I insensitive before about telling you Donna was gone?”

“No.” Josh dragged a hand through his hair. “You know what, though, Donna said the strangest thing before she left. She told me Jack’s not her soulmate.”

“Did she.” Leo was mentally checking his watch, but Josh couldn’t stop himself.

“Yeah, she did. And she knows I don’t believe in them, so I don’t get it. What was the point of that? It’s none of my business, right?”

“Hmm, I wonder. What possible reason could Donna have to talk to you of all people, about soulmates?” Leo was so rarely sarcastic that Josh raised his eyebrows, not sure what he was missing.

His boss sighed. “Oh, get it together, would you please?”

“I’m trying.”

That night, he tripped over one of his shoes on his way to bed, bleary-eyed from staying on the phones so late. 

Rubbing his knee where he’d landed hard, Josh thought it was probably going to bruise.

As he fell asleep, he pictured Donna curled up in front of a fire at the Washington Inn. 

He wondered if her knee hurt, too.

**Author's Note:**

> Title borrowed from "Rewrite the Stars" by Zac Efron & Zendaya.


End file.
